I'm pretty sure that the sound & picture quality went off a bit after a few visitors stayed over a few months back, I think the monitor refresh rate & alsa audio device on boot went crackers about then too

So it must have been something out of whack - that the "Hard Reset" sorted out

The NAS was streaming to the HTPC via ethernet cable: NAS↭switch↭access point↭router↭HTPC

I know output should be identical with either a LAN connection, an internal HDD or a external HDD

But the picture & especially the sound quality difference has been confirmed by 2 other people

The reason all this happened is because I'm going away for a while, new hardware in my knees, and I definitely don't want others mucking around with my network servers, so the servers will be shutdown and all popular media in the household will be on the HTPC's internal HDD

I hard reset LibreELEC

Then before putting the HDD inside my HTPC, I formatted it to Ext 4 & loaded the media, all this was done with a QNAP server

Previously, when booting up the HTPC:

Settings / System / Display / Refresh Rate would often need attention as it would revert 30.00 instead of 59.94

The Concord brand HDMI cables have rather large aluminium looking plug heads, I had 2 of these in the TV's HDMI 1&2 inputs which are very close together & they were squashed in fairly tight against each other,

HDMI 1 : HTPC picture quality was down & audio was not synced ... but HDMI 2 : the Blu-ray player when I tested it out it had a weird overall strong purple/pinkish tint on startup, video playback etc?

so I plugged the Blu-ray into HDMI 3 & all the problems have gone

One more Question .. LibreELEC upscales my 720p & 1080p videos I backed up on the NAS, so if I installed a Blu-ray player in my HTPC would I get the same upscaling to 3840×2160 from my original blu-ray disks?

The HDMI inputs 1&2 ( these are recommended for 4K ) on new TV are on LHS, so I moved my HTPC to that side temporarily as a 2 metre HDMI cable was longest I had.

Today I bought a 3 metre 4K cable a $35 Concord brand from Jaycar & set it all up ... Whilst playing video the picture quality is quite noticably down ?

Video motion was smooth but looked like 720p & when scanning or moving through my Kodi library sideways motion was juddery & not smooth

LibreELEC settings showed 3840×2160 at 59.94hz - but TV info showed 3840×2160 at 30hz? and I couldn't find anyway in settings to change it

So I reconnected the 2 metre cable again (stretched it to HDMI 4 after squeezing everything up) .. video smooth and sharp + TV info back to 3840×2160 at 60hz and all is good again

I thought HDMI was good up to 5 metres ?

Also to make matters worse I have some speaker issues .. the powered speaker is on the LHS, 1.5 metre RCA cables worked perfectly ..

but 3 metre cable seem to give a slight lipsync problem which varies from very slight on lower grade video to very noticable on say 1080p etc

The 1.5 metre cable would fit if I made the LHS powered speaker into a RHS speaker & and the RHS passive speaker as a LHS speaker .. then running sound card RHS RCA output to the powered (now RHS) speaker's input & visa-versa for the passive speaker

Would this make for any problems ?? all powered speakers seem to be on the left hand side

Now that you asked .. the "intel" in "10-bit HEVC support for recent Intel GPU generations"

I might be barking up the wrong tree .. that doesn't refer to Nvidia

I'll reinstall LibreELEC 8.0.1 and see if it's just the newer GTX 1050 video card that's done the vast improvement, I never though to test that out first as it was not supposed to have driver support .. the old video card might have been a bit